Bringing the World to your Kitchen

Menu: Pakistan (& Giveaway)

Whenever I cooked our Pakistani Global Table, our little family was swimming in sweat. Each day soared well over 100F (at times over 110F) and my air conditioner had all but decided to go the way of the puffin. So please forgive me if the menu feels a bit summery – a bit light on, well, cooking. While simmering curries for hours are a wonderful hobby for the bone-cold winters of Pakistan, I still managed to eek out a beautiful Pakistani menu for summer livin’ here in Oklahoma (with the exception being the coffee, if only because it whips up in a flash).

Interestingly, the island nation of Palau (up next week on our Global Table Adventure) eats very similar food, so stay tuned for more options (I’m thinkin’ there’ll be a tandoori dish… and who knows what else!).

All three of this week’s recipes were inspired by Laura Kelley’s Silk Road Gourmet. The recipes and the meal review will be posted throughout the week.

Garlic Basmati Rice with Pine Nuts [Recipe]
Take everything you love about garlic knots and put it in rice. You’ll get a real garlic kick with this rice dish popular all over southwest Asia… our variation, cooked with ghee and sprinkled liberally with cilantro, gives it a distinct Pakistani edge.

Pakistani Mixed Bean Salad [Recipe]
You can thank Pakistan for this great potluck dish. Forget the tired three bean salad of canned food fame. This one is bright and just a little spicy – made with chickpeas, northern white beans, chili pepper, onion and cilantro. Finished with bright lemon juice and a dusting of garam masala.

Pakistani Coffee with Cinnamon & Cardamom [Recipe]
Escape to milky coffee bliss, made dreamy with the addition of sugar, cinnamon stick, and fresh cardamom pods. Pakistani coffee involves some frothing, smiling and sipping. (All of those at the mouth, except the first one. Of course.)

WEEKLY GIVEAWAY

Let’s go potluck crazy. It’s that time of year – back to school, back to the grind, back to whatever it is you like to do when summer slides out of sight.

Hopefully among those things you like to do is potluck.

This week, because I love, love, love the color red, I am giving away this beautiful red stoneware Potluck Baker. This rustic lidded vessel with wooden spoon makes it easy to share your favorite Global Table recipes with friends and family. It’s ideal for cooking and taking food to go in rustic style!

Personally, I think our Pakistani bean salad would be just lovely in this red beauty (and,as a bonus, the thick walls would help keep the salad cool).

TO ENTER

Simply leave a comment answering the following question:

What international dish would you like to put in this baker and where in the world would you like to eat it?

Perhaps Käsknöpfle (triple cheesy spaetzel), which you could eat in the Alps?

Or maybe our Dhal Baht, which you could enjoy with a few dear friends at the park near your house?

Have fun! There’s no right or wrong answers.

As always, *bonus entries* will be provided for those that tweet this giveaway with hashtag #globalgiveaway and/or share it on Pinterest and Facebook.

UPDATE:

*Winner from this week’s Pakistani Menu Giveaway was selected at random by random.org. There were lots of great ideas for how to fill the potluck baker. Congratulations to Christina, who said:

“If a genie in a bottle gave me 1 wish, I would put Peruvian pollo a la brasa & lomo saltado in it & have a picnic lunch at Machu Picchu or anywhere in the Andes in Peru or Ecuador. A big chunk of my heart got left in Peru & I really, really want to go back. Plus, the food is amazing.”

One comment will be selected at random. Winner will be announced in the Monday Meal Review. Contest closes Monday morning 8/20/12. Must claim prize by 8/25/12, at midnight. There are no sponsors for this giveaway. I just wanted to share some potluck love, from me to you. Enjoy!

Oh! I would love to put any rajmah or bhindi masala, or muttar paneer (oh the options~!) in this beautiful dish and have a quiet dinner at the park with some good friends! (I already have a few friends picked out :D)

Kalua Pig and Rice……pot luck style……Hamoa Beach,Hana,Maui Hawaii with great friends and family…ps I make your El Salvadorean Quesadilla for my Salvadorean husband and in laws…they say its the best very authentic thanks…I’ll be sorry when you are all done

I think I might potluck the Balkan Baked Beans I love how slow cooked the onions in that dish…with some sides of fresh bread.it could be delicious…P.S> this basmati rice dish with pines nuts sounds sooooo yummy..I love pine nuts in almost anything..

You know, I forgot to say WHERE, and I had my place all picked out! In Grenoble, France. My grandparents have a beautiful house (made of mud, it’s that old) and the soup in the Potluck Baker would fit right in there with them. Bonne chance à tous!

It looks loke a good way to carry any sort of goulash or thick soup (like a good curry soup). If the walls are insulated, it could also carry some ice cream (I happen to have some blueberry cardamom ice cream in my freezer right now. I know that Iceland was a while ago, but the blueberries at the farmers marker were quite recent).

If a genie in a bottle gave me 1 wish, I would put Peruvian pollo a la brasa & lomo saltado in it & have a picnic lunch at Machu Picchu or anywhere in the Andes in Peru or Ecuador. A big chunk of my heart got left in Peru & I really, really want to go back. Plus, the food is amazing.

Jonathan and I have been talking about making one of your stuffed artichoke recipes (I’m thinking the Italian one). So maybe we could fill this up with a few of those and share with his roomies on movie night!

Rice. Or rice pudding. Or rice and beans. Or rice and lentils. Notice a theme?! As for where, I would share them with good friends old and new at our annual block party – Smoketoberfest! What a beautiful dish.

We are trying to buy a house so I would love to eat the Smoked Ham & Green Bean Jollof in the kitchen of our new house with my hubby. Awwww. I’m so sappy but that made me teary eyed. LOL!!! Thanks for the wonderful giveaway 🙂

When I saw this pot, I thought it would be just perfect for cooking a lovely Persian rice dish, with dried apricots, pistachios, and all sorts of wonderful spices.

As for where I’d like to eat that, I’d dearly love to visit my old friend Shahlo in Kyrgyzstan – her Uzbek cuisine is one of the most delicious I’ve encountered, and it’s hard to stay in touch when she has to rely on Internet cafés to communicate with the outside world.

Bosanski lonac 🙂 (Bosnian pot …basically fall veggies with meat that cooks until the meat is falling apart) and I would eat it on my late grandfathers land with family, while we are camping and making home made raki in the autumn. That is one beautiful pot :D.

This gorgeous cooking pot just begs for a delicious one-dish supper! I would either love to make a my chicken, brown rice, black bean, onion and green chile spicy one pot dish we enjoy either as a stew or wrapped in tortillas, OR as Nuri said, a delicious Moroccan deeply spiced and slowly cooked chicken tagine, mmmm…where could be anywhere – I would love to visit Morocco tho’ – definitely! 🙂

I would love a big ole pot of traditional butter chicken that I had 11 years ago in Lucknow India. I was there for a wedding and it was steaming hot but the butter chicken was gorgeous… and until then I had no idea that butter chicken didn’t have cream in it… but that the creamyness came from cashews ground and thrown in the sauce. it’s the perfect reminder of so many lifechanging moments that come with your first overseas travel.

I would make Julia Child’s Beef Bourgogne recipe in honor of her 100th Birthday in this beautiful “Red Stoneware Potluck Baker” and we would eat in out on the grass area behind our house overlooking the wonderful lake.

I would make and serve Qaubili Pilau from Afganistan. This was my first meal for my own culinary adventure around the world. It is still one of my favorites. I would eat this great autumn meal right here in the USA, watching the sunset on Race Point Beach in the Cape Cod National Seashore near Provencetown, Massachusetts.

I would make the burmese ginger salad! All those flavors sound like they would be terrific together and something that would be easy to take to a potluck. Which is where I would take that handy-dandy stoneware dish. My friends and I hold potlucks every so often to stay in touch and I love bringing new and exciting dishes. If I could have that potluck anywhere in the world though, it would be in a SE Asian country I haven’t been to. Maybe Thailand or Laos.

The deep red makes me think of fall – wishful thinking in this heat! I have a favorite cassoulet that I love to make when my while family comes to my house! But it would be good in a cabin in the Alps, too…

Hi, I would so so love to have a typical vegetarian dish from Gujarat (India) called “Undhiyu”, made with potatoes, sweet potatoes, eggplant lots of other good stuff..perfect potluck dish and enjoy it on any of the beautiful mountains of Alaska! yum! I am off to day dreaming..

So many choices; but for a potluck casserole dish I’ll go with a good and simple Chinese stewed dish. One of the first I learned in college from a neighbor. And since I lived on Sacramento St. right on the edge of Chinatown in San Fransisco, CA. this one is great for a rainy day .’Red cooked spiced chicken’ with plenty of chicken, green onions soy sauce, ginger root, star anise, dried tangerine peel, Szechewan peppercorns, 1 cinnamon stick, sherry, brown sugar( or it should be rock sugar to be authentic), and a bit sesame oil. So fragrant and warming on a cold ,wet day.

I would attempt to make the delicious french dish, Cassoulet. Ideally I would cook it in Paris, so that I could then take it to the Champs du Mars, or some spot over looking the Seine. With my husband by my side et bien sur a bottle of vino, we could eat dirctly from the pot, savoring every yummy bite.